’90s Grunge Bands: Where Are They Now?

We’ve been pretty wrapped up in ’90s nostalgia lately. But here at Flavorpill, we’re not just about TV. In fact, if you really want to know, our heart truly and unironically belongs to the music of the early ’90s: grunge. Everyone knows that Pearl Jam are still selling out stadiums, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains have recently reunited, Mudhoney are doing a Superfuzz Bigmuffvictory lap, Stone Temple Pilots are still… doing whatever it is that they do, and Hole/Courtney Love is knee-deep in comeback/Twitter. And, of course, we all remember how things ended for Nirvana and Blind Melon. But what ever happened to Screaming Trees post-“Nearly Lost You” or Toadies post-“Possum Kingdom”? How about the ladies of 7 Year Bitch, Babes in Toyland, and L7? We even checked in on radio-friendly unit shifters like Silverchair and Collective Soul. Listen to their best-known songs and get an update on their whereabouts after the jump.

Screaming TreesThe song you remember them by: “Nearly Lost You” (1992)

Where are they now?
Screaming Trees did record one album after their 1992 breakthrough, Sweet Oblivion. But despite decent reviews, Dust (1996) came after the grunge moment had passed, and its sales were disappointing. The band didn’t break up until 2000, after performing at a concert for the debut of Seattle’s Experience Music Project. By then, lead singer Mark Lanegan was already four albums into a solo career. He’s also frequently guested on Queens of the Stone Age and Twilight Singers albums (that band, by the way, was founded by Afghan Whig Greg Dulli) and collaborated with Soulsavers on 2006’s It’s Not How Far You Fall, It’s the Way You Land and 2009’s Broken. But perhaps the biggest Lanegan news in the past half-decade has been his and Belle & Sebastian alum Isobell Campbell’s enchanting 2007 full-length Ballad of the Broken Seas, its 2008 followup Sunday at Devil Dirt, and another Lanegan/Dulli project, The Gutter Twins, whose debut Saturnalia appeared in 2008. (A third Lanegan/Campbell album, Hawk, is due out later this summer.)

As for Screaming Trees members who aren’t Lanegan, lead guitarist Gary Lee Conner has supposedly been working on a project called Amanita Caterpillar since 2004… but we can’t find it on Allmusic, and it doesn’t look like they’ve released much of anything. (Their MySpace page is also down.) Conner does have a MySpace page that led us to Microdot Gnome, a psychedelic solo project with a trippy song called “Confessions of the White Rabbit.” He lives in Texas with his wife and daughter and, according to Wikipedia, is a “newspaper courier.”

Van Conner, Gary Lee’s brother and Screaming Trees’ bassist, has sat in with Dinosaur Jr. and Queens of the Stone Age. He, too, has a MySpace page. Van is now in a pretty bizarre metal band called Valis, which you can listen to at MySpace. Back in January, he recorded this loopy, atmospheric song and made the video for it, all in five hours.

Barrett Martin, the drummer who joined the group after original Mark Pickerel left in 1992, has been the most prolific. As a session musician, he played with everyone from Luna to Air to R.E.M. He’s also traveled around the world, studying indigenous drummers from South America to Africa. But perhaps the biggest news is that Martin is now a Zen monk who creates music and visual art inspired by his beliefs. He also recently became part of the rock band Big High.